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Transversal Color and Derek Jarman's Blue

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Transversal Color and Derek Jarman's Blue Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Communication Theses Department of Communication Summer 8-12-2014 Step Into a Blue Funk: Transversal Color and Derek Jarman's Blue Daren Fowler Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_theses Recommended Citation Fowler, Daren, "Step Into a Blue Funk: Transversal Color and Derek Jarman's Blue." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2014. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_theses/109 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Communication at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. STEP INTO A BLUE FUNK: TRANSVERSAL COLOR IN DEREK JARMAN’S BLUE by DAREN FOWLER Under the Direction of Angelo Restivo ABSTRACT Derek Jarman’s Blue has a complicated reception and exhibition history. Stuck between his past representational queer cinema and the inability to represent the suffering and death from AIDS, Jarman crafted a film of radical stylistics. It is in Blue’s striking color that a transversality of form, sensation, and visuality occurs, and in so doing, produces a space for synesthetic affectivity and collective desire. This thesis will use those radical formal elements and the history of Jarman and Blue to position color away from the phobic tradition of color theory and towards a flowing site of political rupture. INDEX WORDS: Blue, Derek Jarman, Color, Transversality, Collective, Felix Guattari STEP INTO A BLUE FUNK: TRANSVERSAL COLOR IN DEREK JARMAN’S BLUE by DAREN FOWLER A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2014 Copyright by Daren Randall Fowler 2014 STEP INTO A BLUE FUNK: TRANSVERSAL COLOR IN DEREK JARMAN’S BLUE by DAREN FOWLER Committee Chair: Angelo Restivo Committee: Jennifer Barker Alessandra Raengo Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University August 2014 iv To my grandfather, Harry Burnett Randall, III, Your love and support were the greatest of gifts. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I began down this blued path over five years ago while at Oklahoma State. Therefore, I must first thank Brian Price and Meaghan Sutherland for introducing me to Blue, experimental cinema, and the wonders of media studies. They continually pushed me to my intellectual breaking point, and that rigor and mentorship continues to define my work and person. I want to thank my committee for ushering those wandering ideas of color into coherence and vibrancy. This project began by circulating around questions of phenomenology and without Jennifer Barker I would never have realized that my original idea had an impossible scope. Alessandra Raengo asked possibly the most important question, “Why representation?” Testing my abilities every step of the way, Alessandra showed me just how much I could accomplish. Finally, I am grateful to Angelo Restivo for his patience, guidance, support, and advice in helping guide me to this project’s key ideas and keeping me sane. Thank you to my dearest, most beautiful friends—Erika, Katy, Kelsey, and Jing—for suffering through my fears and ramblings and being there for me throughout. Most importantly, I must thank my family. To my cousins, thank you for giving me friendship and escape from the struggles of my education and teaching. To my grandparents, thank you for the love, belief, and hope constantly sent and the confidence it built. To my brother, Derek, thank you for being my greatest defender and dearest friend. And to my parents, Jane and Jim, thank you for always supporting my decisions (the good and terrifying), for believing in my abilities and dreams, and for the untold support in fulfilling my passions. I cannot imagine this project or my life without you standing beside me. Thank you all. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ........................................................................................................... v ENTER THE BLUE ........................................................................................................................ 1 1. STUCK IN THE GRAVEN IMAGE ......................................................................................... 7 2. O BLUE COME FORTH ......................................................................................................... 24 3. AN OPEN DOOR .................................................................................................................... 38 A BLUE FUNK ............................................................................................................................. 50 REFERENCES .............................................................................................................................. 62 1 ENTER THE BLUE I first saw Blue in late 2010. It was in a course on color and Blue was the finale. To say I was excited at the prospect of seeing Blue would be wildly inaccurate. Sitting down to a seventy-five minute film entirely in blue and filled with the ramblings of a “relic” from the 70s gay political cinema sounded profoundly boring and decidedly pretentious—the absurdity of a twenty-year-old Ingmar Bergman fanatic having apprehensions towards pretense did not occur to me. I dragged myself to the screening, ready for the worst, and sat down in my normal seat directly to the side of the digital projector. With the lights off, the projector hummed to life, and the light projected a black image upon the screen. Quiet ringing of bells echoed out of the speakers, reverberating through the small screening room, and the film’s title appeared brightly against the black backdrop. The letters from the names impatiently shivered until the blue annihilated the black and overtook the screen. As the bells quieted and the organ softly appeared, Nigel Terry began the invocation of blue, telling me “open your eyes…cry out saying, ‘O Blue come forth, O Blue arise, O Blue ascend, O Blue come in.’” The black image burnt away by a harsh appearance of blue light, and Blue pushed forward through coffee shops, doctors offices, and homes into remembrances, recitations, and proclamations, the blue never ceased flowing out the projector and onto the screen. The blue continued on for seventy minutes, never yielding. Jarman’s experience and expression and Simon Fischer Turner’s score populated the blue image with alternating solemnity, profanity, and absurdity of emotions and physicality associated and birthed from Jarman’s impending death from AIDS. 2 With the sudden appearance of the full blue image, I had to shield my eyes from the burning blue light. Behind my closed eyes I saw the first revelation in Blue—it had marked my eyes. I attempted to escape the blue behind shut eyelids, but it continued on, denying me freedom, piercing my body, and taking over my vision. For a few seconds, I did not need the screen to experience the color, I only needed the narration, score, and the blue scorched on the surface of my eyes. The blue overwhelmed my body, like a virus desperately attempting to reproduce through consuming the body it infects. My reticence faded with that painful discovery, and opening my eyes to a beautiful and vibrating aquamarine image only transfixed me further. And yet, no matter the striking quality of its shade or its ability to infect the body with desire, the unending blue and the narration surrounding it became dull after a while. There is only so much the blue can show before it begins to feel redundant. Blue was beautiful, but not that beautiful. The narration changes, but without a shifting image, the experience eventually became tedious. My eyes instinctively wandered, looking away to find something else to fill my mind, if only for a moment to pass the time. And it was then, in this boredom, I stumbled upon what the blue image caused in the space: the room had become fully blue. Everything from the chairs to the walls, ceiling, whiteboard, projector, my peers, and myself were covered in blue. Blue extended past the screen into the space of its projection, and transformed everything it touched into itself. The blue not only seared my eyes, but the room. The totality of blue made it possible for me to reach out and touch the blue covering my arm. I could feel the blue; I could feel my body heat becoming a part of the blue. The blue had become tangible, transitioning 3 from screen, to room, to body—enveloping me into its fold. There was no escaping the blue except to leave the room and Blue behind, abandoning the experience. This radical aesthetic aggressively grappled with how to produce an image of something unimaginably painful. While today, “living with AIDS” has become commonplace, in 1993 that was a fantasy; the truth was a slow death where even lying down was near impossible from the lesions and swellings mutilating the body. What image effectively presents such a grueling and devastating reality? Jarman’s concern with this question led to Blue’s overwhelming, painful, and annihilating visual and aural expression and subsequent challenge to ancestral forms of image making and consumption. The blue of Blue ruptures space, giving rise to “incorporeal Universes…infinitely open, transformative, unpredictable, uncoordinated worlds that transport one out of the everyday.”1 The depleting
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